Writing the Big One

It is one thing to get the information, and quite another to become conscious of it, to know that we have got it. In our brains there are many mansions, and most of the doors are locked, with the keys inside. Usually, from our first meeting with a person, we get some single main impression, or like or dislike, confidence or disturst, reality or artificiality, or some single, vivid something that we cannot pin down in more than a tentative, vague phrase. That little phrase is like the visible mvoing fin of a great fish in a dark pool: we can see only the fin: we cannot see the fish, let alone catch or lift it out.

-- Ted Hughes, "Poetry in the Making"